Between dream and nightmare

Boris Nelepo

Hobbling nurse Jen without delay singles out a sleeping soldier who looks just like Clark Kent, Superman's alter ego. His superpower is being able to smell the flowers he sees in his dreams - some skill for a military man. If it were up to him, Itt the soldier would rather sell mooncakes than wash the generals' cars. But, what is a Thai filmmaker to do when last year's coup, his country's twelfth in 80 years, leaves him petrified with fear and despondency? Apichatpong Weerasethakul doesn't want to show weapons or bloodshed or suffering on screen; nor does he know how. Though an articulate political statement, his Cemetery of Splendour also relates a tale of impossible love reminiscent of Jean-Claude Brisseau's The Girl from Nowhere, weaving a dream chronicle into a childhood memoir.

Here director revisits his hometown of Khon Kaen, for which he longed in Chicago while working on his short 011664322509 and where the autobiographical Syndromes and a Century was partially set. The visionary auteur often uses the expression “the burden of memory”. On his journey northeast, he circles around the locations of Uncle Boonmee..., whose characters referred to some "brutal hunt for communists." In Blissfully Yours, a character points to the jungle and says, "This is where the ghosts of Japanese soldiers dwell." The goddesses in Cemetery tell Jen outright that the earth beneath her feet is strewn with corpses.

The past holds people hostage. A portrait of General Sarit Thanarat, who was instrumental in the 1947 coup and staged the insurgences of 1957-58, now oversees the soldiers in the canteen. As it pans across town Apichatpong’s camera comes to a halt at a militarist low relief also dedicated to Thanarat. Unlike Joe's earlier vistas of mellow moods, Cemetery of Splendour appears shot through with currents of anxiety, disquiet, and paranoia. In one of the film's recognizable leitmotifs, the characters treat each other with continual mistrust, suspecting some clandestine identity in everyone: is he a terrorist, police spy, FBI agent? Jen suddenly remembers that her ex-husband was in the army, too - and a veritable monster he was. His name turns out to be Colonel Narong. A biographical detail from the actress's life, but at the same time Colonel Narong, a member of the “Three Tyrants” that seized the power in the 1960s, did exist. “When you’re asleep your metabolism slows down. Someday you’ll see a better future,” Jen promises Itt.

A dissolve - an image from one scene transitioning slowly into the next - is perhaps the most apt word to describe Cemetery. A former school is transformed, temporarily, into a hospital. In the movie’s climax, Keng the medium channels the spirit of Itt who lies asleep and thus evidently suggests a metaphor for the acting profession, even though the audience for this performance consists of Jen alone. It’s worth noting that the part of Itt went to the same actor who had played soldier Keng in Tropical Malady, so the medium in the new movie quite literally becomes the old Keng. When in the medium’s body, Itt takes Jen for a walk through the woods showing her an imaginary reality that includes a king’s throne room, a music room, a room of mirrors, and pink marble. The dissolve technique is deployed to great effect in the giddy scene at a movie theater, where Apichatpong captures in an uninterrupted take five escalators moving in different directions; slowly, the images of soldiers dozing in a hospital seep through onto the screen. The ward we see now is equipped with bizarre, downright fantastic tubes constantly changing color.

This color therapy is supposed to chase away nightmares. Jen professes her love for Itt as she only knows how: “When you’re asleep even the bright city lights look boring.” At some point Jen wants to wake up, and Itt instructs her to open her eyes as wide as she can. In the very last - and most disquieting - shot, she sits in front of a furrowed football field, children playing among holes, and tries her best to open her eyes. However, the hardest part is to draw the line between a dream and a nightmare.

Dead-ends

Giona A. Nazzaro

Amidst the totally over-the-top full-blown non-stop action galore, there lies hidden at the core of Fury Road an almost theoretical film about the complexities of the transformations that cinema has gone through in the past few decades. If much is to be applauded in Miller's choice about going analogic in the realm of post post-modern digital action cinema, then maybe his critical discourse and proposition can even more be appreciated. Strip everything away from Fury Road and you are left with an almost abstract film. What once would have been labelled as an "avantgarde" film. First of all, the main character. The film title plays with the notion that it is the very same Mad Max of the first three films. But then, again, and without diving in the fandom conspiracy theories, there's really nothing in the film to substantiate this claim. So: Max is not Max after all. Who is he then? The guy called Max, aptly identified as a "bloodbag" (even though he protests a different identity), is literally the narrative blood that keeps the film flowing. The audience keeps their eyes on him and the film moves. So "that" guy carries the fuel blueprint of the film as precisely as Monica Vitti carried the hyperdynamic stillness of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura on her body and in her gaze. And if the characters in Antonioni's films about alienation and anonimity in modern European architectural lanscapes didn't have anywhere to go, so does Max. With some differences, though. The urban lanscape has been substituted with a desertic nowhere land which, of course, over the years has become a commonplace and popular symbol of the failure of capitalistic society. But Miller expands on the basic idea with a wonderful ironic footnote. Given that there is no need for another hero, and that after Joyce and Eliot heroes have become something completely different altogether, Miller gives his Max with no name at least two different options: you can go either forward or backward. History has not only repeated itself enough already, it has definitely exhausted itself. So what is left of adventure and action? Not much. You can go either forward or backward. That is what's left of the great spectacle that once was cinema. Space has become a two-lane road on which you can re-stage the great spectacle of repetition; replay all the former stories that have already been re-told over and over again in different industrial manners. While Antonioni staged the end of the western world as the end of the possibilities given to culture to shape or reshape ways of communicating, Miller, in a very ironical way, creates the "überstage" for the definitive image of what western culture has become as seen through the lenses of that very cinema which imagined itself, in Griffith's work, as an extension of the Dickensian ethos. Fury Road, really, is the swan song, maybe the sublime, while also earnest, parody of all the dead-ends that contemporary cinema has taken.

A foreign body against the greens, yellows and browns

James Lattimer

Although Arabian Nights is a work of perpetual interpolation, it’s the second volume that celebrates both the pleasure and pain of insertion, for when one thing is put into another, some things change, but others do not. Perhaps that’s what makes The Desolate One so affecting, the slow, aching realisation that however joyful the insertion, it will still be swallowed up by reality sooner or later. Even where there is blood, there will later be pragmatism.

Clad in red, rangy fugitive Simão always feels like a foreign body against the greens, yellows and browns of the Portuguese landscape, despite his best efforts to blend in. At one point, he does indeed vanish into the vista behind him, only to frustratingly reappear shortly afterwards. As Simão roves this austere realm, a string of absurdities is inserted into his wanderings: a donkey dragging Miguel Gomes’ bloodied corpse, a trio of nubile women who offer all the trimmings, a pedalo for pottering across a lake. But all this absurdity comes to nothing in the impassive setting, drowned out by the relentless buzzing of insects, the roar of the wind, the sound of birdsong. It’s no surprise when the landscape finally expels Simão too, his capture as implacable as the air, the rocks and the sun or the lone poplar visible from his cell.

A principled judge must preside over a straightforward matter, the case of a desperate woman driven to sell her landlord’s possessions. Everyday life in a Portugal gripped by austerity, even if this nocturnal assembly is held in an ancient amphitheatre and not all its attendees are human. As the judge probes further, the circle of the implicated only widens: a runaway cow, a yelping pack of unrepentant thieves, a put-upon genie, a mournful olive tree. Yet all these gleeful injections of fantasy fall silent in the face of reality, each happy flight of fancy wrenched back down to earth by another true-life detail of Portuguese suffering. And it’s inevitably one final insertion that brings tears to the judge’s eyes, a note placed in a wallet to replace the money it held, a dignified apology for a theft whose only culprit is the situation itself.

Somewhere among the trees, mist and herds of sheep, there lies a housing estate whose inhabitants are uncommonly sad, grown weary of evictions, rusted-up lifts and the air currents that circulate between the blocks. Yet one day, a mysterious newcomer arrives to lift the gloom, a quiet marvel in the form of a white dog named Dixie. His is a truly beneficent presence which does indeed spread joy, offering comfort to the desperate and uniting the marginalised. But tragedy is an unstoppable force, for even inserting such a perfect machine for loving into this cruel world cannot change its essential nature. Maybe that’s why Dixie must also be a machine for forgetting, shutting out the misery around him so as to continue his mission, the only thing able to confound him being the sheer miracle of his own spectral presence.